Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics

Making available scientific information in the third millennium: perspectives for the neuroscientific community

The rules governing the globalised process of sharing scientific information in the research community are rapidly changing. From the 1950s, commercial publishers started owning a large number of scientific journals and consequently the marketable value of a submitted manuscript has become an increasingly important factor in publishing decisions. Recently some publishers have developed the Open Access (OA), a business scheme which may help stopping such tendency. Indeed, in the case of an open-access publication, the marketable value of a manuscript may be not the primary consideration, since access to the research is not being sold. This may push scientists to re-consider the purpose of peer reviewing. However, costs remain a key point in managing scientific journals because OA method does not eliminate peer review process. Thus, OA may not solve the problem of the market pressures on publishing strategies. Furthermore, the OA has another strong point: everyone can read OA papers, including scientist living in poor countries. But, will OA method create new discriminations on who can publish on OA journals? Will it be possible to really exclude or strongly limit the influences of the market from scientific publishing? The example of the non-profit e-print arXiv (http://arXiv.org/), a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers with no peer review will be discussed. For neuroscientists, the possibility to make available scientific data, even in the case of negative results (usually, very difficult to publish) is an important step to avoid purposeless repetition of costly experiments involving animal subjects. The possibility to arrange internationally or locally peer reviewed papers in institutional repositories (IR) is a necessity. However, access to IR should be regulated, e.g. banning or limiting profit organizations and exploiting internet systems, professional organizations or network groups

Is organic diet really necessary for children?

The presentation focuse on the impact of pesticides on growing organisms, such as infants and young childre

The Drivers of Success in the NFL: Differences in Factors Affecting the Probability of Winning Based on First Half Performance

This paper explores how changing various end game statistics effects a given teams probability of winning a game in the National Football League (NFL). Data from the 2000-2016 NFL seasons is split into two subsets, one for teams winning at halftime, another for losing teams. Using this data an empirical model is estimated to study how the determinants of a team’s success differ between the two sets of data. Overall, the factors which determine a team’s outcome are consistent between the two subsets, varying primarily by magnitude of the effect

Variation in Environmental Parameters in Research and Aquaculture: Effects on Behaviour, Physiology and Cell Biology of Teleost Fish

Over the last few years the increasing use of fish as animal models in scientific research and the increased fish breeding for human consumption have stressed the need for more knowledge on the effect of variations in environmental parameters on fish biology and on the welfare of specimens used both in research and aquaculture contexts. Experimental evidence shows that environmental variations can affect fish biology at various levels, from the molecular to that of the population, sometimes in a different way depending on the species considered. In order to achieve reproducible results in experiments involving fish it is necessary to set and maintain all environmental parameters constant at the optimal value to guarantee the wellness of the animal. The effects of the variation in environmental parameters on the behaviour, physiology and cell biology of teleosts are here discussed in order to provide useful information for research based on fish models

The Microsoft 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System

We describe the 2017 version of Microsoft's conversational speech recognition system, in which we update our 2016 system with recent developments in neural-network-based acoustic and language modeling to further advance the state of the art on the Switchboard speech recognition task. The system adds a CNN-BLSTM acoustic model to the set of model architectures we combined previously, and includes character-based and dialog session aware LSTM language models in rescoring. For system combination we adopt a two-stage approach, whereby subsets of acoustic models are first combined at the senone/frame level, followed by a word-level voting via confusion networks. We also added a confusion network rescoring step after system combination. The resulting system yields a 5.1\% word error rate on the 2000 Switchboard evaluation set